Site Mobile Navigation

Parenting From Earth's Orbit

Karen L. Nyberg, left, and her Italian colleague Luca Parmitano. Both are parents who are spending six months aboard the International Space Station. Credit
Kirill Kudryavtsev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — What is the right stuff for a mother in space?

Karen L. Nyberg, an American astronaut whose son, Jack, is 3 years old, is taking the next six months to find out.

Along with docking space ships and conducting science experiments, Ms. Nyberg, 43, who blasted off in late May, is using her tour at the International Space Station to grapple publicly with the difficulty of separating from a child because of work. She is cooperating with a Scandinavian television documentary on motherhood, has spoken to magazines on parenting and embraced the question her long business trip inevitably poses: how to choose between a dream job that requires long travel and the pull of children at home.

“It’s a challenge because my son is 3. He will do a lot of growing in six months,” Ms. Nyberg told journalists before the launching, speaking from behind a glass wall to prevent last-minute infections.

“But I will see a lot of video of him,” she said. “We will be very well connected. And he will be home with Daddy” — Doug Hurley, who is also an astronaut.

A mother in space is not a new phenomenon: The first, Anna Fisher, an American, blasted off in 1984 aboard the space shuttle Discovery, leaving behind a 1-year-old daughter, Kristin. (Space authorities do not keep records on how many astronauts, the vast majority of whom are male, are also parents.)

But with the International Space Station occupied by six people nearly permanently, and no fewer than three at any time, many more mothers and fathers are spending long spells away in space.

Neither NASA nor the Russian Federal Space Agency, the lead partners in the International Space Station, has a policy on parenting and work at the station, where astronauts and cosmonauts typically spend six months on rotations. The choice to go, or not, is individual.

Still, turning down too many trips can eventually harm a career — a point taken in Russia’s labor law, which allows mothers of children age 3 or younger and single fathers to opt out of work travel without repercussions. If they do choose to travel, the law specifies that they must provide their employer with a letter waiving their right to stay at home. U.S. labor law has no similar provision.

“In Russia, normally, bringing up a child is more a woman’s obligation,” Nadezhda Ilyushina, a labor lawyer with the Goltsblat law firm in Moscow, explained. “A child needs female attention.”

The contrast of today’s space moms — gregarious public figures, open to media attention — with the experience of the first woman in space is striking.

When Valentina Tereshkova, Russia’s first female cosmonaut and the first woman to fly in space, took off 50 years ago from this same site, she did not tell her family where she was going. She said she was headed to a competition of parachutists, as preparation for the flight was secret.

Only two Russian women have followed since — Svetlana Y. Savitskaya in the 1980s, and Elena V. Kondakova in the 1990s, who spent more than five months away from her daughter for her first spaceflight. Of the remaining 54 women who have been in space, 45 are American.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Nicole Stott, an American who flew to the International Space Station in 2009 when her son, Roman, was 7, said it helped to show him her training and to introduce him to her crewmates.

“It’s like a kid getting to see the toys their parents get to spend time with,” she said. “You want to make sure your family is involved with that adventure you are about to have.”

Cady Coleman, an American astronaut who spent Mother’s Day in space in 2011, took a stuffed tiger with her to photograph beside her experiments to amuse her 10-year-old son.

Ms. Nyberg, too, has taken some of her son’s toys so that he can see them float in zero gravity during video calls.

As female astronauts look for ways to cope with long separations from their families, they say they can count on the experience, and the example, of their male counterparts.

Because liftoffs are emotional, and the fear lurks that Mom or Dad will not return, NASA prefers to keep families cloistered from public view as a launching approaches, a spokesman said.

The Russian Space Agency takes a different approach. Families are very much welcome at the spartan launch site in Kazakhstan, although there is little room to allow even a few moments of privacy.

When Ms. Nyberg blasted off last month aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, her crewmates included two other parents: Luca Parmitano, an Italian fighter pilot and flight engineer, and Fyodor N. Yurchikhin, a Russian space veteran.

Mr. Yurchikhin parted with his wife, Larisa, and daughters, Lena, 11, and Dania, 19, before a crowd of officials, pressing his gloved hand against the glass, winking and saying, “Don’t worry, my girls, everything will be all right.”

When he first flew, he said, Lena was 1 year old. “When I got back I asked, ‘Where was Daddy?’ and she pointed to the television set,” he said. Lena squirmed now at the recollection.

Ms. Nyberg, who had trained with the two men for years, said the three would “support each other knowing we have families at home whom we miss.”